Making music has gotten easier; selling it has gotten harder. Making music has been democratized, but the market is in the hands of fascists.

Don't believe everything you see on VH1.

That whole thing of replicating what others do is a siren call. The sirens lure you to the rocks of unoriginality.

Music has an immediate effect. If you want to go beyond that and look underneath, film is a good way of explaining.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

I studied music for my first two years in college. When I went to UC Berkeley, I failed the admission requirements to get into the music school there, so I studied communications and public policy, which actually were a greater engine for my career than a musical education would have been. If I had gotten into the music department at Berkeley, I'd probably be a timpanist in an orchestra right now.

Ive got Arabic music in my blood.